Every two years, the non-profit association Tapis de Fleurs brings together a committee of professionals – illustrators, graphic designers, landscape architects, who come up with scale projects, with each edition illustrating a theme focusing on major events, a country, a continent, the coat of arms of a city. Once the theme has taken shape in the form of a model and symbols, the number of flowers is calculated and the combinations of colours are established. The hundreds of thousands of cut flowers necessary for the composition can then be reserved, very long in advance. Several days before the inauguration, a full-size drawing is executed on sheets of micro-perforated plastic that are laid down atop the cobblestones of the Grand-Place.

Image: Begonia

Every two years the Grand-Place in Brussels is covered with a flower carpet of begonias. The carpet of 77 m x 24 m is composed by about 120 volunteers, with nearly 1 million begonias in less than 4 hours.

Image: Birds of Paradise, Mexican flora.

The 2018 theme of the flower carpet is Mexico. The Flower Carpet is dedicated to Guanajuato, a Mexican region with a particularly rich floral culture and tradition.

Image: Mexican flora, courtesy of Manfred Richter.

More than 100 volunteer gardeners put together this giant floral design in less than eight hours. The day before the opening, the spaces between the floral motifs are filled in using rolls of sod.

Image: Mexican flora

The flowers are so closely-packed that they can not be blown away, and indeed they create their own microclimate! If there is a heat wave, the sod is watered to prevent it from wilting. If the weather is too wet, the grass can grow by 4 to 5 centimetres in 3 days. The flowers remain fresh and preserve their splendour during the four days.